Hi Steemians!

Long time lurker that is really interested in investing. Not just crypto but also the 'traditional' types like stocks and shares. I'm planning to do some trade journal style content and hope Steemians find them.

Intro

For a long time now I've been keeping a journal of my trades, cataloging my thoughts on some of my trades. I found it to be a good way to keep myself level headed and remind myself of why I'm holding something in the face of large potential losses or just to keep track of how something is trending in general.

While discussing some trade ideas with friends a few days back, it suddenly dawned on me that it MIGHT be interesting to share my journal and thoughts with more people to get potentially very valuable feedback. Steemit seemed like a good platform to do so and I decided to finally create my account to potentially do that. So, do let me know if you Steemians would like to continue seeing this kind of content and if I should spend the time cleaning up my journal for you!

Another thing I want / like to do is to get people started on trading. To that end, I'm going to try and keep my commentary somewhat simple. With that said, since I'm posting a trade journal style (not a tutorial / guide), I'm going to inevitably have to use some technical terms so that my post doesn't get to be 20 pages long. I'll be happy to write up a guide for some of these strategies if there is interest, but even if I don't, they should be fairly easy to Google. Let me know if a guide sounds interesting to the community though!

I know you guys are big on verifying identity, but given the fact that I might be discussing literal trades with potentially significant dollar amounts attached, I'm going to opt to keep my anonymity for now. Hope you guys don't mind!

But nevertheless, I like to put money where my mouth is, so here is screenshot (with dates and my username for some kind of verification) of some trades I did awhile back.

As you probably can tell from the screenshot, I like to trade options. I'll talk a little about why I made some of these trades my thoughts on some of these stocks.

So without further ado, here is my first journal on Steemit! Let me know how I can improve both my trades and posting!

*I want to place a disclaimer that this is not trade advice. You should really do your own research before investing. This is just meant to invite discussion

First up.. SNAP (Snap Inc.)

I've been very bearish on SNAP since their IPO about 6 months ago. With FB and instagram on a tear, I really don't see a reason (at least right now) that they should be worth a market captilization of ~17bil. They have been posting very poor earnings results and their IPO lock up period is about to expire. I expect quite a dip in price which is why I bought these cheap puts. I already have a significant set of puts on SNAP, there was a small uptrend yesterday and I couldn't resist getting more.

Don't get me wrong. The app itself might actually be loads of fun, but if a business cannot monetize its users, I don't think it can or should be worth that much money.

Next we have NVDA (Nvidia)

Overall I'm pretty bullish on NVDA, I think they are very strong in the GPU and self-driving car market which means they are going to see their value sky rocket over the next few months.

My trades yesterday basically reflect my bullish stance on NVDA. I basically close out 1 covered call and while opening another covered call at a higher strike. While I do think that NVDA will trend up in the long run, I also do think that we will see some profit taking as we are reaching all time highs. I feel like I will have an opportunity to take profits on the new covered call before its expiry in September.

Now for the main show... NFLX (Netflix)

I'm basically re-calibrating my portfolio after a blowout earnings report from NFLX. Netflix is also another company that I am very bullish on. They basically changed the way a lot of people consume entertainment and show no signs of slowing down. I sold some covered calls before earnings as a hedge on my position but it looks like I might get most of my stock called away. I'm not closing this one out because I feel like I missed the opportunity to do so (NVDA still has earnings while NFLX is post earnings).

To rectify that, I'm selling some naked puts to either try get back into the stock at prices I definitely wouldn't mind picking NFLX back up at. Or, I can also profit if NFLX decides to run further up allowing me to keep the options premium.

Best for last... AMD (Advanced Micro Devices)

AMD is actually the main stock in my portfolio. I initially bought a little into AMD but reading about their (then) upcoming and (now) newly released product line up, I started to get really bullish on AMD. The new Ryzen / EPYC CPUs color me very optimistic about the stock. To some extent, even their Vega GPU doesn't seem all that bad.

Anyway, I'm both buying calls and selling naked puts to either add to my AMD position or to (hopefully) close them out for a profit. I added these yesterday because AMD suffered and survived 2 (in my opinion nonsensical) analyst downgrades almost unscathed which indicates that faith in the stock is very high.

Others

BBRY (BlackBerry)

This was just a small trade I did to try and captialize on the launch of the KeyOne.

BAC (Bank of America)

BAC had a pretty decent earnings estimate beat but for some reason traded down by a little. I'm not sure why that would happen, but I'm not complaining. Its given me a pretty good opportunity to close out my covered call at a profit and add a few calls to my position

Ethereum

It is kinda hard to talk to anyone about crypto today without talking about the ETH Parity hack. Its huge, I know. I truly sympathize with anyone that lost anything as a result of the hack.

But interestingly, the hack has demonstrated the resiliency of ETH's ability to hold value overall given that it pretty much regained all its lost value. I know a part of it is probably the potential BTC SegWit lock in, but I genuinely believe that the last large dip has shaken out a lot of the "weak" investors that were holding on to coins they got from long ago and can pretty much sell at any price while making a profit.

Outro

I'm probably going to post a few more journals over the next week or so to see if there is interest in the content. Either way, if you read this far, I sincerely thank you and hope to get some feedback!